Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga will launch on April 5. The date comes from a new gameplay overview trailer, which dropped exactly one minute after Polygon reported that that game has led to a crunch crisis at developer TT Games.
Setting itself apart as one of the largest Lego games ever, The Skywalker Saga is poised to arrive with a suite of new features. As Lego versions of the franchise’s characters, players will be able to chain together combos against enemies, counter incoming attacks, and take cover while they line up a blaster shot.
Paired with immense open-world levels that players will be able to explore, The Skywalker Saga, which has been in development for nearly five years, is seemingly a major evolution for the Lego Star Wars franchise.
However, that evolution has reportedly come at a cost. According to a report from Polygon, the longtime developer behind numerous Lego-inspired video games, TT Games, has seen numerous issues during The Skywalker Saga‘s development cycle, including feature creep and high staff turnover due to mismanagement.
According to the article, which cites over 20 current and former employees at the studio, developers grew increasingly frustrated as they had to use a new engine to make the game, which was unstable and caused hours of lost work due to crashes.
Crunch has also reportedly played a large part in The Skywalker Saga‘s development, although that isn’t anything new for TT Games. Polygon’s report goes on to claim crunch has been systemic at TT Games for years now, with one former employee saying “A big problem was that crunch was premeditated. It wasn’t an emergency protocol for when things went wrong. Instead, it was a tool in the box for production; projects were planned with crunch periods in the schedule, or even worse, crunch was the schedule.”
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga launches on April 5 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
